ACLU Releases Documents on License Plate Scanners

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Saturday, July 20, 2013
ACLU

BALTIMORE
û Police departments around the country and around the state are
rapidly expanding their use of automatic license plate readers to track
the location of American drivers, but few have meaningful rules in place
to protect driversÆ privacy rights, according to documents released
today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland (ACLU-MD).
As a result, the new documents reveal, many departments are keeping
innocent peopleÆs location information stored for years or even
indefinitely, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of a crime.
In Maryland, for every one million plates read, only 47 were potentially
associated with serious crimes.

ôThe
spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect, government
location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of
innocent Americans in huge databases,ö said ACLU
Staff Attorney Catherine Crump, the reportÆs lead author. ôWe donÆt
object to the use of these systems to flag cars that are stolen or
belong to fugitives, but these documents show a dire need for rules to
make sure that this technology isnÆt used for unbridled government
surveillance.ö

The
systems use cameras mounted on patrol cars or on objects like road
signs and bridges, and the documents show that their deployment is
increasing rapidly, with significant funding coming from federal grants.
They photograph every license plate they encounter, use software to
read the number and add a time and location stamp, then record the
information in a database. Police are alerted when numbers match ôhot
listsö containing license numbers of interest, such as stolen cars.

Last summer, ACLU
affiliates in 38 states and Washington filed nearly 600 Freedom of
Information requests asking federal, state, and local agencies how they
use the readers. The 26,000 pages of documents produced by the agencies
that responded û about half û include training materials, internal
memos, and policy statements. The results and analysis are detailed in
an ACLU report released today called ôYou Are Being Tracked,ö which includes charts and policy recommendations.

The
study found that not only are license plate scanners widely deployed,
but few police departments place any substantial restrictions on how
they can be used. The approach in the Montgomery County Police
Department is typical: a police policy document there says that license
plate reader data can be used for any ôofficial law enforcement
purposes.ö While most Maryland police departments do prohibit police
officers from using license plate readers for personal uses such as
tracking friends, these are the only restrictions. Both Baltimore
County and the City of Frederick are unusual in placing some limits on
the use of LPRs in connection with expressive activities.

A
tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as ôhits.ö For
example, in Maryland, MCAC recorded 29 million reads from January
through May of 2012, but only 0.2 percent of those license plates, or
about 1 in 500, were hits. That is, only 0.2 percent of reads were
associated with any crime, wrongdoing, minor registration problem, or
even suspicion of a problem. Of the 0.2 percent that were hits, 97
percent were for a suspended or revoked registration or a violation of
MarylandÆs Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program. In other words, for
every million plates read and stored in Maryland, only 47 (0.005
percent) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person
wanted for a serious crime.

Yet,
the documents show that many police departments are storing û for long
periods of time û huge numbers of records on scanned plates that do not
return hits. For example, as of November 19, 2012, Prince GeorgeÆs
County had over nine million plate reads stored. Baltimore County
similarly stored over nine million records over the course of a year.
Wicomico County reported having 532,749 scans stored from only three LRP
units. Most police departments in Maryland send their data to the
Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC), MarylandÆs ôfusion
center,ö where they are kept for one year. As a result, in 2012 MCAC
stored over 85 million license plate scan records.

ôMaryland
is leading the way in centralized LPR data aggregation, which makes the
privacy implications of this technology all the more pressing,ö said
David Rocah, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU
of Maryland. ôAs the number of scanners continues to increase, and as
more and more departments acquire the technology and pool their data in
MarylandÆs Fusion Center, law enforcementÆs ability to paint detailed
pictures of every MarylanderÆs movements will grow ever more powerful.
We need statutory controls before itÆs too late to address this issue.ö

The
documents show that policies on how long police keep this data vary
widely. Some departments delete records within days or weeks, some keep
them for years, while others retain them forever. Most departments in
Maryland store data for one year. Montgomery, Anne Arundel, and Wicomico
counties store their LPR data indefinitely. In contrast, Takoma Park
deletes records after 30 days, and the City of Frederick deletes its
data after 90 days. Maine and Arkansas have passed laws prohibiting the
police from retaining the license plate location records of innocent
drivers for extended periods.

The ACLU
report released today has over a dozen specific recommendations for
government use of license plate scanner systems, including: police must
have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining the
data; unless there are legitimate reasons to retain records, they
should be deleted within days or weeks at most; and, people should be
able to find out if their carsÆ location history is in a law enforcement
database.

In Maryland, the ACLU-MD
will be advocating for state legislation in the 2014 General Assembly
session to sharply limit the amount of time that information acquired
from ALPRs can be retained if there is not ôhitö generated from a scan.

License
plate readers are used not only by police but also by private
companies, which themselves make their data available to police with
little or no oversight or privacy protections. One of these private
databases, run by a company called Vigilant Solutions, holds over 800
million license plate location records and is used by over 2,200 law
enforcement agencies, including the Baltimore County Police.